README

# Learning Programming Through Competition - The Ant Arena

## About 

This project is a result of a university final year project, aimed an creating an application that can be used to introduce users to java programming in an interesting and competative way.

Users write code for a single ant that will make up members of their colony. 
Each colony must collect food an fend of attckers in a bit to be the last one alive. When users have produced ants they are happy with, their code is run together to see whose ant code is superior.

This project is written in Java and is cross-platform.

## Usage

A precompiled .jar can be found on my site. On most systems double clicking with run the jar. For those that won't run `java -jar LPTC_Full.jar` from a command prompt or terminal.

For acutal usage, check the documentation .pdf for a quick getting started.


## Compilation

To compile you will need the following libries: (They are all in /lib at the moment but this may/will change)

lwjgl.jar - From the LWJGL project, For rendering
org.eclipse.jdt.core_3.7.1.v_B76_R37x.jar - Form the JDT Core project, for code compilation
slick.jar - For the game rending in OpenGL using LWJGL
snakeyaml-1.9.jar - For Parsing of .yml option files
vecmath.jar - For use of Vector math classes ( Apparently not present by default in java but is on the OSX installation )

An ant script will appear at some point. Until then making a new Eclispe project with this folder as this existing source does the trick. Add the jars to the classpath. (Right Click > Build Path > Add to build path). Create a Run Configuration using me.paulrose.ltpc.AntAreanaApplication as the entry point.

When running lwjgl needs the location of the natives, specified by -Djava.library.path=/path/to/natices. If using Eclipse run configuations don't forget to add this as a VM configuration.

## Contact

Please leave any issues on the project and wiki as and when you find them and fork this to make it better!